Thank you Luke xxx
Me:
Can’t even believe I’ve said yes.
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
I can. You’ll smash it.
Me:
Might need you to come and instill that confidence in me on Friday.
Me:
If I don’t poo myself on the bus there, obv.
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
You won’t. Even if I have to sit on the phone with you on the bus.
Me:
Ha. Like old times!
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
Yep. Leave it to me. I’ll get you there in one piece.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
“I still don’t think your voice matches your face.”
Lucas laughs down the line. “I still don’t know how to take that comment.”
“It’s nothing bad,” I say. The bus veers a corner, and I shoot a hand out to hold on to the seat in front of me. “I just think you look a tiny bit like Richard Gere.”
“Emmie, I am sixteen.”
“A young Richard Gere.”
“Which is still old, man,” laughs Lucas. “He’s been, like, forty forever, hasn’t he?”
I burst out laughing, a hand instinctively flying up to cover my mouth. I look over my shoulder. The top deck is empty, save for one other student: a girl I recognize from two years below. She’s reading from a Latin book—something they teach at an after-school club that goes on until four thirty—and she looks up at me, our eyes meeting. I sweep around to face the front before I see even a glimmer of anything. I bet she knows too. She might be quiet, mousy, hardworking, but they all know. The whole school knows it was me now, who wrote that anonymous letter about what Mr. Morgan did. The whole school knows I am the reason he moved away, that Georgia doesn’t speak to me now and instead cries in class, kids flocking around her. She’ll tell her, I bet, this mousy girl.
“She doesn’t even care. She was laughing on the bus. Like, proper full-blown laughing.”
And they’ll whisper about it in English class, loud enough for me to hear, like they did today. “Did you hear she and Zack Aylott in the year above shagged last year? They’d been going out like a week.” “She blatantly fancied Morgan. You could tell.” “Georgia said she’s a proper liar. Always has been.”
“Hey. You still there?”
I close my eyes, lean my head against the bus window. “Yeah,” I say. I hate how wobbly my voice always is lately. “Still on the bus. Are you sure about this phone call, Lucas?”
“ ’Course. Dad gets free minutes on his business phone.”
“And he doesn’t mind?”
“He doesn’t know,” laughs Lucas. “But nah, he probably wouldn’t care. Think he’s just happy not to see me moping about or hearing me bang on about missing London and saying I wish I was back in England. Even though I really, really do.”
“I wish you were too.”
“Be cool, wouldn’t it?” says Lucas. I love the way he speaks. He sounds older than the boys at school. Smarter. Cooler. “You could come and help me and my brother eat this weird-as-shit dinner my mum has made. Chicken. With orange things in it. Apricots, I think. Even if we don’t like it, my dad is a total demon headmaster about it and makes us eat it. I could make you eat mine. Then you could show me one of your crap films.”
I can’t help but smile at that. “I wish I could.”
“Same,” Lucas says, and my stomach bubbles with longing, because I want that more than anything. I want dinner made for me. I want to be in a busy family home, with the clink of washing up, and bloated, full, warm tummies, I want to sit under a blanket watching films, chatting during the quiet bits. I want a friend. I miss so much having a friend.
“You all right?” asks Lucas.
“Yeah. Just tired.”
“Another day done, though,” says Lucas.
“And it was a hard day,” I say. “Every class, I had with Georgia.”
“But you did it,” says Lucas. “You did it, and you’re on the bus home to watch EastEnders and eat cheese-and-pickle sandwiches.”
“Lucas, I told you, I hate pickles.”
“You will eat Branston pickles for your poor homesick mate, and like it.” He laughs. Mate. I love that he said he’s my mate.
I push the bell on the bus. “I’ll compromise with you and have Marmite on toast,” I say.
“This is basically phone sex now you’ve mentioned Marmite, Emmie.”
I laugh again, not caring about the girl behind me, or what she might report back. I’m allowed to laugh. I am allowed to live my life, go to school, and learn. Lucas is right. I haven’t done anything wrong. “You’re the weirdest person I have ever met,” I tell him as the bus slows, and I stand up.
“Except we haven’t met,” says Lucas. “Lived an hour from each other our whole lives and only found out each other existed the month I moved countries. Mental, eh?”
“So mental,” I say. “That balloon was a sadist, really.”
“And a genius,” adds Lucas.
Voice mail.
Again, straight to voice mail. Lucas’s phone never goes to voice mail. Ever. Why today? Why now, when I really need him? I stare up at the school gates, the huge square windows looming, the tops of many heads at an upstairs classroom window, the lines and lines of bikes chained up at the entrance, the edges of computer screens through the windows of another room, and I feel my stomach lurch. I can’t. I thought I could, but I can’t do this.
I back away, my legs shaking, feet tripping down the curb. And that is when my phone bursts into song in my hand. Without even glancing at the screen, I rush it to my ear. It’ll be Lucas. It’ll be Lucas full of apologies that he wasn’t there, on the phone, like he said he would be.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
I freeze in the street, the sky darkening with rain clouds above. “Me? W-Who… is this?”
There is a sigh and a familiar warm laugh on the line. “Do you really not have my number saved yet?”
“Um…”
“Jesus. It’s me. Eliot.”
“Oh. Sorry. Hi.” I take a breath and start walking now, bag over my shoulder, picking up speed. That’s it, then, I suppose. I’m not going to do it, am I? I’m not going to walk through those gates. I thought I could. I really thought I was going to do this, but I can’t. “I, er, forgot to save your number, after your texts. Sorry.”
“Emmie, are you okay?” Eliot asks. “You sound a bit… weird.”
What is it about someone asking if you’re okay? Even if you think you’re holding it together, all it takes is someone asking if you’re all right to completely melt away your resolve and bring that lump bobbing straight into your throat. “I just—I had a job interview and I couldn’t go in. Just now. When you rang.”
Eliot hesitates on the line. “Okay?” he says slowly. “Is there a reason you couldn’t?”
I get to the bus stop, my chest is tight, my feet—in heels I borrowed from Rosie—are unsteady, scuffing on the pavement as I sit down clumsily. A man looks over his phone at me, eyeing me as if he disapproves of my sitting beside him. “It w-was in a school,” I tell Eliot, my voice wobbly, disjointed. “I really liked the sound of it, and the money was—but you know, I just took one look at it and—I couldn’t go in. I was… overwhelmed or… something.”